Friday is Park[ing] Day – #bneparkingday

Join community groups and residents in West End’s Sussex Street and along Boundary Street on Friday 16 September 2016 as we transform parking spaces into people friendly parks.

PARK(ing) Day is an annual worldwide event where teams transform on-street car parking spots into temporary public parks and other spaces for people to enjoy. Events will be held across the city and are supported by Brisbane City Council.

This installation will raise awareness of the capacity for small public spaces to be transformed into productive community parklets.

The temporary park will include recreational space with a barbecue, seating, plants, and shade. Residents are invited to come and enjoy the park and our pikelets.

This installation is a collaboration with Tangara residents and community groups and will feature a program of Special Guests:
11:00 – Swara Songbirds choir
12:30 – Jonathan Sri – Poetry
13:00 – Cliff Draper and Pam Bourke – Music and Song.

The organisers want this temporary parklet to help people visualise how we can break up the… tarmac and create new permanent green space on the peninsula.

Repurposing road space to create more green space is a one of the key principles of the award winning Green Space Strategy for West End, Highgate Hill and South Brisbane being developed by local landscape architects incl. John Mongard, Gavin Hardy, Michelle Kirby-Brown and Alvin Kirby who have worked in conjunction with local community groups (incl. Kurilpa Futures and WECA).

Right to Brisbane – Corner of Russell and Boundary streets, West End (outside Rumpus Room)

Right to Brisbane will create public square for the day. The space will include benches, tables and chairs, a chess table or other activity and a board on which people can write their ideas about what public space is needed in the local area.

Right to Brisbane say on their Facebook post that they, “…question and seek to challenge the Brisbane City Council’s commercialisation and sanctification of Park(ing) Day, what was once a grassroots, citizen-led action that aimed to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated”, adding, “But hey, we’ll take the little piece of new temporary public space BCC has offered us, have a lovely afternoon in the spring sunshine AND use this event as a platform to continue to push for genuine, democratic, collective control over the way our city is designed, built and run.”

Voting is via an online form which opens at 10:30am on Friday 16 September 2016 and closes at 5pm on Monday 19 September.

If you can’t get to the PARKs in person, the PARK(ing) Day teams will be posting images of their PARKs on the day to Brisbane City Council’s webpage using #bneparkingday, so you can still be able to vote for your favourite PARK online.

Follow the events on Instagram and Facebook using the hash tag #bneparkingday